Napkintalk

Creative Modeling for Technology Visionaries Qualitative & Simplified Quantitative Modeling for Product Creation Module 7: Napkintalk David E. Goldberg University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois 61801 [email_address]

Engineering Creativity as Visual
Modern engineering education hung up on science and math.
Importance of language.
Much engineering creativity is visual.
Ability to think visually important in early stages of product development.
Visual thinking often key to category creation and enhancement.

Roadmap
Napkintalk & napkinthink.
Ferguson’s distinction between engineer and artisan.
Learning to see & the mind’s eye.
Sketches: representation of what is or what should be.
Diagrams: representation of thoughts or abstractions and their relationships.
Quad charts: conceptual dimensions in 2D.

Napkintalk
Napkintalk/think: 2 engineers in a restaurant.
Ode to the paper napkin: http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?AD=1&AD=1&ArticleID=4588
Napkin goes back and forth.
Deconstruct:
Social process.
Verbal exchange (dialectic).
Visual exchange of sketched images.

Drawing as Distinction
Ferguson makes distinction between artisans and engineers on the basis of engineer’s drawing and artisan’s lack!
Design is a contingent process.
Visual thinking is important throughout.
Engineering education also involved shop classes.
Hands dirty & understood connection between drawings and things made.

Short History of Demise of Drawing
World War2 mobilized engineers and scientists on war effort.
Led by engineer, Vannevar Bush.
The Endless Frontier created NSF and devaluation of visual thinking began.
Few electrical engineers or computer scientists take engineering graphics.
Other disciplines dropping it.
Sketching a lost art.
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974)

Why Visual Thinking Matters
Four good reasons:
Every pen stroke a creation.
Represent world as it is.
Create world that might be.
Enhance thought process by representing thoughts and relationships between them in pictures.

Every Mark of Pen Creates
For most people, most common creative act is to put pen to paper.
Writing a word or sketching a figure creates something that did not exist.
By definition, a creative act.
Think of pens and pencils as creative tools.
Buy them, try different ones.
Find some favorites.

Learning to See & Represent
Brains have become symbolically dominated, but need to get in touch with what is.
Drawing class a place to start.
Exercises from Betty Edwards.

Upside Down Exercise
Take exercise sheet.
Half class right side up.
Half class up side down.
Take short period to draw line drawing.
No tracing.

What’s the Point?
Upside down drawings tend to be better.
Less “symbol” thinking.
Good results after 5 days of training.
You can learn to see and draw what you see.

More Typical Sketch
Useful ≠ work of art.
Engineers represent designs w/ sketches.
Convey conception or idea of invention.
Example Edison’s 1877 conception of the phonograph.

Diagramming
Sketching is about representing things.
Diagramming is about representing concepts and their relationships.
What is being represented: people, activities, terms, concepts, combination?.
Prescriptive vs. descriptive vs. hybrid.
Form of representation: graph or other form.
People
Organizational chart
Social networks
Activities
Flow/process charts
Schedules
Systems dynamics
Fishbone
Ideas & terms
Orbits
Layers
Venn diagram
Semantic nets
Quadrants
Positioning diagrams

Organizational Chart
Boxes represent roles & people.
Lines represent reporting relationship.
Generally hierarchical.
Prescriptive.
East Bay Municipal Utility District

Social Network
Who is links to whom in the blogosphere?
Other relationships.
Can move in quantitative direction here.
Descriptive.

Flow Chart
Lays out procedure or process in step-by-step manner.
Activities & decisions.
Oftentimes simple linear process flow.
Can be prescriptive or descriptive.

System Dynamics Diagram
Grew out of Jay Forester’s work.
Qualitative use of control theory.
Consider structure of feedback loops to think qualitatively about system response.

System Dynamics Diagram Jay W. Forrester (b. 1918)

Schedules
Types:
CPM: critical path methods.
PERT: program evaluation and review technique.
Gantt or bar chart: visual representation of schedule.
Precedence descriptive, timing prescriptive.

PERT Chart
Arc as activity.

Bar Chart or Gantt Chart

Ishikawa or Fishbone Diagram
Look for root causes of difficulty.
Descriptive of problem difficulty.
Purpose: diagnosis & prevention.
Quality management keen on visual representation.

Orbit Diagrams
Inside to outside.
Drawn wrt insider.
Example: DISCUS.
Prescriptive.

Venn Diagram
Explicit representation of overlap or intersection.
John Venn introduced 1881.
VennDiagram.ppt Link to image

Architectural Layers

Back to Aristotelian Data Mining
Have different dimensions of product/customer/org space from ADM.
Consider theory or experiments in two or more dimensions at a time.
Types:
Quadrants
Positioning diagrams
Radar diagrams

Quad Chart

Stokes Quadrants
D. E. Stokes (1997). Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Positioning Diagram
From discrete to continuous.
Often used in marketing to explore notion of niche.
Un- or under-exploited market opportunities.
Econobox Luxury Price Conservative Sporty Lifestyle American Family Sedans German Sports Sedans

Radar Diagram
Multiple dimensions.
Useful to measure wrt ideal.
Quality example.
Point in n-space represented by pattern.
http://www.mmo.org.tr/endustrimuhendisligi/2003_3/a_field_studyofmeasuring_dosyalar/image008.gif

Bottom Line
Visual thinking is a companion to verbal thinking for the engineer.
Perhaps even more central to engineering thought.
Sketching to learn to see & invent.
Diagramming to relate concepts.
Variety of ways to do.
Quadrants tie verbal dimensions to the visual.

Napkintalk

by David E. Goldberg on Jan 20, 2008

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

3 Embeds 17

Statistics

Napkintalk — Presentation Transcript

http://entrepreneurialengineer.blogspot.com	9
http://www.entrepreneurialengineer.blogspot.com	7
http://www.slideshare.net	1